Gillick swings his texts on the hinge of these flickers and ambiguities, on the softening and blur of hard rules imposed from authorities above, so that his art flashes alternating moments of authenticity and artificiality, analysis and speculative fictions, continually proposing that there is no single determinate factor that guides new social engagement and alignments, but many — just as he claims there is no universal reader of his work (or anyone else’s), only segmentations of readerships that cross over one another. The ambiguities of the work are his fruitfully unstable ground, his terra infirma, that germinates the hermeneutical strategy of unending interpretation, of a certain inexhaustibility of the text dependent on each individual reading that resolves the work or simply leaves it unresolved and open. By Gillick’s lights, this territory of the unrectified proposition is where administrative order and legislative imperatives are thrown into the air.

There’s a nostalgia in all this for the revolutionary élan of May 1968 and the Situationist idea of the dérive of Guy Debord’s notion of drifting from routine in order to restructure experience. They hang above Gillick’s art like tutelary spirits, hovering over his use of words and objects as the means of slippage, upheaval, of resistance to the singularity problem. Yet for all the bright colors and the briskness of his texts, they also have a melancholy and worry about them of the missed or thwarted chance, as if they were "born under the sign of Saturn," as Walter Benjamin described himself, "the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays."

One night this past winter, Gillick and I sat in a café on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Bearded and quick-witted, he was relaxed but fidgety, with the manner of someone in constant need of nicotine. He was unsure of what he would do in Venice (and weeks before the opening he was still saying his plans were unfixed). Many e-mails between us about his work had brought him to offer a friendly warning that night, a rebuttal to all this talk of ambiguity, which he followed up with another note.

"Don’t get hypnotized by the parallels and layers in the practice. Focus on what’s said and made. There’s very little ambiguity in the work," he argued, and then ran down a list. "McNamara, 1992, predicts the collapse and apology of a former car executive running a war.... Erasmus Is Late, 1995, plays with the notion of time slippages within the context of ‘the day before the mob becomes the workers.’ It’s about the last moment for a certain kind of revolution. Discussion Island, 1997, concerns how planning and speculation can be determined in a neoliberal context. The most recent work looks at the notion of crisis [Construccion de Uno; 2005] in a culture where there is [supposed to be] no crisis. Somehow that seems familiar in the current situation, no?"

It all sounds convincing in a glossing way, but like so much else in Gillick’s art, the intriguing part is that this is merely part of the story. He has an appetite for ideologies, and ideologies have an appetite for generalizations. The invisible middle, or the "critique of the middle ground," as he puts it, is open and shifting enough to be the perfect centrifuge for his ideological concerns — a maze of ideas to snare his viewer-readers. He said it himself: "Certain things work as lures or attractors, while other things hold you away in a web of text." So be careful when you enter Gillick’s zone. There is always the risk, as Dante said at the start of The Divine Comedy, that in the middle way we find ourselves in dark woods. Dante had Virgil to guide him through them. But we have a guide whose every strategy is to query and destabilize, to produce "new relationships rather than clearly definable results," as he once said. In Venice, as we step into the echoing hall of Speer’s bullying architecture, we will be in the clever hands of Liam Gillick, social inquisitor, eraser of borders. Our smiling, unreliable narrator.

"The Singularity Problem" originally appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' Summer 2009 Table of Contents.